This invention relates to reading devices for the visual impaired, and to methods for displaying electronic files such as internet web pages.
As the Internet has become an important communication tool, the visually impaired require display devices that permit Internet content such as web pages to be displayed. Electro-mechanical devices have served to translate text into a tactilely readable format such as the Braille character set, which employs a matrix of tactile elements for each character, symbol, or word, with each element either being a flat spot or a raised bump. The standard Braille character set uses an 8-dot matrix (2 columns of 4 dots), allowing adequate permutations, with the character matrices spaced apart on a surface to allow them to be distinguished.
To display graphic content, such as icons, symbols, a cursor, borders, arrows, drawings, and photo images, a tactile device requires that the tactile elements be evenly and closely spaced apart. Such devices have been proposed which use a matrix arranged on a standard Braille 1.5 mm dot pitch, so that Braille characters are displayed by leaving intervening columns and rows of dots blank or flat, and so that simple graphic images are displayed in a dot matrix fashion using all available tactile elements.
Other systems may be developed having a tactile element matrix with a finer resolution than the standard Braille dot spacing, with each dot generated by raising a cluster of tactile elements, and a number of inactive tactile elements between each adjacent Braille dot. This would permit a finer resolution for graphical purposes than provided for by the standard Braille dot pitch.
However, these systems are believed to be currently limited to the simple translation of electronic text (such as may be received in ASCII format) into strings of tactilely displayed Braille symbols. Since much of the content of a web page or other file may be in non-text form, this is not discemable to a visually impaired user of current Braille display devices. Current systems lack a means of identifying which words are selectable hypertext links to other web pages or downloadable content, nor do they provide a convenient means to locate such links on a page of text or to select and activate such links. Because the visually impaired user is unable to find these links xe2x80x9cat a glancexe2x80x9d in the manner of sighted users, he or she must serially read through the entire text to find a link of interest.
Web browsing often involves proceeding through several xe2x80x9clayersxe2x80x9d of pages at a web site to reach the page with the desired content. For a sighted person, this can be rapid; for the visually impaired, it can be time consuming to read up to the entire content of each page to find the desired link to the next page. This delay is exacerbated by the limited rate at which Braille text may be read.
The present invention overcomes the limitations of the prior art by providing a method of communicating electronic information via a display device having a matrix of movable tactile elements. The method includes displaying a representation of a file containing hypertext links on a first portion of the matrix, and displaying a list of the hypertext links on a second portion of the matrix. The representation may include graphical elements and text symbols such as Braille.